Hi there... as you are reading this, there are some things you should know. First, i am new to this fourm. Second, i am a 14 year old who just recently had a serious talk with his parents about life. Now, i have now decided in my life that i Want to make video games because i get to design, compose music, and draw my own game. Though, i do need help in knowing how to make a game, so if anyone can help me, it would be majorly appreciated.

I know you may not want to hear this but making games is hard and takes a lot of work. You're young and have a lot of time to decide what you want to do. You may well end up making games for a living but don't block yourself off from trying new things because you're so focused on wanting to make games. Maybe, in your high school career, you'll discover you don't actually want to make games but want to be a music composer, physicist, doctor, or what-have-you. Be open to trying a wide range of classes.

Anyway, with that out of the way, you'll probably want to read through this article. It talks about getting started with game programming. You say you want to make games because you get to design, compose music, and draw your games. You may not be interested in actually programming games but in making art and music for games or game design. Another good thing to read through would be the FAQs at Sloperama. I'm sure those will be helpful to you as well and should get you started.

To get started in programming games, why don't you take a trip to the local library and checkout some books on making games in BASIC. You can type the examples from the book into a BASIC interpreter and get lots of practice from there. The games will be simple text-based games, but this can still be a fun and rewarding experience!

I honestly don't care about your age. I know a boy who started programming in a very young age and became a web master in his 17, but David is right. Making game is a lot of work, and this 'lot' is really lot of things.

If you want to start making games as soon as possible, I will suggest you to follow Steve's link and get started, or simply download some game makers. I don't recommend that though. It's always a good idea to learn the very basic things first.

If you're not in hurry, go learn programming. Some people say Python is a great language to start with, so I suggest you to go with it. I found that Python is pretty easy myself. Go here for some tutorial.

Learning programming is very useful. It makes you a better analyzer (I don't know why, but this word really tickles me), thinker, and gives you better logic which will help you to make games.

After you learn basic programming, go for some library to make games. PyGame is good.

Now, i have now decided in my life that i Want to make video games because i get to design, compose music, and draw my own game.

Games need designers and they need composers, but the jobs are extremely rare.

Designers are generally hired from within the ranks of established game developers, so there is no entry path there.

A single composer can support multiple game titles so even a studio with 200+ employees may only have one musician, and composing scores will be just one of many tasks.

So that leaves art.

Art is a reliable career path into games. There are many disciplines within art used by games; concept art, modeling and texturing, animating, user interfaces, and pixel art. Then post-production artists are involved in marketing.

At age fourteen you need to draw a lot. You need to get comfortable with a tablet; get a good Wacom tablet if you don't already have one and re-learn how to draw.

No matter which discipline you go in you will need to study theory of art, and art history. You won't be given daily quizzes or asked what colors are complimentary, but you will be expected to create art that looks good in many lighting conditions while staying true to an overarching theme. That means a solid understanding of theory.

You will also need to be comfortable drawing all sorts of things. You may prefer drawing guns and women, but a game artist will be called on to create objects from mythical (dragons and unicorns) to the mundane (trees, flowers, rocks, more rocks, more flowers and trees, a town well, some boulders to sit on, and a path with paving stones). Somebody gets to model and texture and place all the building blocks seen in digital worlds, and that means architecture and landscape. It means creating and modeling and animating cows and goats and horses and tigers and rabbits and birds and other animals. Vehicles range from historic to futuristic bicycles and skateboards and carts and buggies and cars and trucks and semi-tractors. It means fashion for armor and shirts and pants and tunics and hairstyles and shoes and jewelry. Everything needs to be drawn. It gets drawn by concept artists. It gets redrawn by pixel artists. It gets drawn again by modelers and texturers.

If that excites you, then start drawing. Draw everything, because that's what you will be expected to create.

I can't recommend Construct 2 enough for you. It's easy to learn and allows you to concentrate your efforts on what you like most, music and art. You don't need any programming knowledge. There are a ton of great tutorials out there for it too.

I started getting into game development when I was 14 too! I remember I didn't have internet at the time, so I would go to the library and browse various game dev websites and forums on their blazing fast 56Kbps modem Anyway, as others have said, there is a good bit to game development, but if you take your time and enjoy the process everything will fall into place. The best place to start, imo, is by using some sort of game engine. For me it was RPGToolkit 2.0. A game engine will help you understand the whole picture more clearly and allow you to actually gain the experience of developing games without being burdened by a whole bunch of technicalities. At least, that's how things worked out for me. I think I was in seventh grade when I finished my first game with RPGToolkit. It involved my English Teacher trying to take over the world, and you had to defeat her via a turn-based RPG battle system. It was full of in-jokes, badly photoshopped images, and very simple graphics, and it was an absolute blast to make.

That was ten years ago, so I'm not really sure if RPGToolkit has kept up with the times. You may want to check out GameMaker if RPGToolkit doesn't work out for you. Just remember: Take your time, read/watch many tutorials, and enjoy yourself.

As far as a career path, you have a fairly wide range of choices when it comes to actually making money and supporting your future self. A few people here seemed to assume work at a traditional game studio, but it is also possible to develop games as an independent (indie.) Given that you want to design, compose, and draw your own game, the indie route may be more of what you are after. As an indie you come up with the ideas and you develop the game from start to finish. It's much more flavorful, if you will, because you get to do everything. You design for a while, and the program for a while, and then draw for a bit, and then do some sound design, etc. It is very difficult for life to become dull when you are a true indie. You can also take on work as a Freelancer and work from home...that's what I ended up doing. There are many clients on oDesk and Elance that need a game engineer who knows their stuff. You often don't need a college degree when you work as Freelancer either. As long as you have a portfolio that displays your awesome skillz you have a very good chance of landing a well-paying job.

Now, I was around the same age when i wanted to start Game Development, let me give you this advice:

By all means follow thew advice above, but above all else.
IT IS A SECONDARY GOAL.
you NEED good results, and Game Design / Computer science etc. is not a huge part of Pre-16 curriculum.

There is a lot to learn in game development, algorithms to learn, programming techniques, design principals etc. If you at 14 spend your time learning all of this, you spend less time getting the results you need to get into University/Collage.

Don't' do what i did and spend your free time making games and neglecting your work, SCHOOL is your first priority, friends/Life come before games at your age. you'll ahve plenty of time to learn how to-do all of this properly once your in a Uni. so don't let it get in your way before hand.